15 March 2010

A week or so ago, I went over to the nearby town of Bath, New York, because I thought I remembered seeing a bookstore on the main street. I didn't find a bookstore but I did find a nice church -- the First Presbyterian Church on the village square. I took the picture above and a couple others. When I got home, I googled the church to see if their website identified the architect. The website said the architect was John Wrey Mould (aka Jacob Wrey Mould) and that the new building was done in 1977. That didn't seem right so I did some more investigating. Mould (1825-1886) worked with Olmsted and Vaux on Central Park and he designed the Belvedere Castle and other monuments. Discovering that was pretty exciting because I'm very fond of the Belvedere Castle which sits high above the Turtle Pond. The church, by the way, was done in 1874-1877 and there's a Tiffany rose window done in 1895. They are doing church tours on Wednesdays in July and August so there will clearly be another expedition to Bath this summer.

Not sure why the variation in first forename. At other points in history, folks have Americanized their names to make them less foreign-sounding. John seems more "normal" than Jacob but I don't know if folks were trying to be less German in the middle of the 19th century.

Completely unrelated (I think) is a small note in the Week in Review section of last Sunday's New York times. The note said that art historian Philip Sohm has determined that Caravaggio has overtaken Michelangelo as a subject for academic study. When I googled that, I found that Michael Kimmelman had written about it on March 9th.